About This Website
This website is provided as a public service for residents of Barrow County, Georgia and surrounding communities. The weather station and website are privately owned and operated and are not affiliated with Barrow County, Georgia.
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Features unique to this station include:
• Local, real time weather that is updated to this site approximately every 5 seconds.
• Barrow County's only live lightning and thunderstorm tracking system!
• Weather forecasts based on local data not from data miles away using WXSIM!
The weather station is located in North West Barrow County, approximately 50 miles North East of Atlanta, and serves the communities of Auburn, Bethlehem, Braselton, Carl, Chateau Elan, Hamilton Mill, Hoschton, Mill Creek, Statham and Winder.
Barrow County, 162.2 square miles in size, was created in 1914 as a way of settling a dispute among the citizens of the City of Winder, which at the time was located at the juncture of three counties. A new county was created from parts of Gwinnett, Jackson, and Walton counties, with Winder designated as the county seat. The new county was named for David Crenshaw "Uncle Dave" Barrow, long-time chancellor of the University of Georgia.
About The Weather Forecasts
The weather forecasts mentioned above are compiled by BarrowCountyWeather.com's WXSIM - Local Atmospheric Modeling System using data from multiple sites in the local and regional area, as well as data from this local weather station. The forecast is automatically run 05:00, 07:00, 12:00, 17:00 and 19:00 on a daily basis. Manual runs which can provide extra accuracy may be run based on unusual weather patterns or times of severe weather.
The forecasts provided by WXSIM are compared to the NWS Regional Office reports and the actual weather to make a reliability comparison. Similar studies in the US have reported significantly better forecasting than the NWS.
WXSIM uses past and current temperatures of the local area and surrounding airport stations and upper air temperature patterns. In addition this forecast takes into account this stations wind speeds, direction and humidity readings. FOUS (Forecast US) and GFS (Global Forecast System) weather computer models are also inputed on each forecast run to arrive at the forecast solution.
Affiliations
Barrow County Weather provides data to regional, national and international weather collection organizations. Barrow County Weather affiliations. In addition, we are active participants in the following:
Member South East Weather Network
National Weather Service Certified SkyWarn Storm Spotter
Amateur Radio - WX4BCW
Validations
This site is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
About This Station
Hardware
• Davis Instruments Vantage Pro II weather station
- Self Emptying Rain Collector
- Temperature Sensor (Inside and outside)
- Humidity Sensor (inside and outside)
- Fan-Aspirated Radiation Shield
- Anemometer (Wind Sensor)
• Boltek StormTracker Lightning Detection System
• Dell Optiplex 330 computer
• Dell Optiplex GX260 computer
• APC uninterruptible power supply
Software
• Windows XP Professional
• Weather-Display
• Virtual Weather Station
• WeatherLink
• WXSIM Local Atmospheric Modeling System
• Nexstorm
• StartWatch
• Virtual VP
• VP Live
• Data is collected every 2 seconds and is updated to the website every 10 seconds
Credits
• Original template based on a template from Designs by Haran
• Additional template modifications by CarterLake.org with PHP conversion by Saratoga-Weather.org and Michiana Weather.com.
• TNETWeather.com for work on the original Carterlake templates, and their design for the common website PHP management.
• Carmosaic.com for CSS styling.
• Saratoga-weather.org for the AJAX conditions display, dashboard and integration of the TNET Weather common PHP site design.
• WebsterWeatherLive.com for the Highs/Lows and Averages script.